Big data does conception: Ovuline's curious sex map

Summary:The number one medical app on iTunes, Ovia, uses big data to help women get pregnant. Parent company Ovuline just released a user data sex map showing conservative states lead in "getting it on" to win the baby race.

Big data fertility company Ovuline just released an interesting set of metrics on its American users' sexual activity.

Its app, Ovia, is the top medical app on iTunes. Ovuline has published a sex map with user's sexual activity data, ranking Idaho as the state having the most sexytime for making babies, with Washington DC coming in last.

Overall, conservative states are leading the race to mate in the US and are getting it on more (in the name of conception, anyway) than liberal states.

The data ranking is based on sex being had specifically for reproduction. These people are trying to make a baby, so we in California can relax about being left out — Ovuline's nifty interactive sex map isn't about the amount of recreational sex (sex for fun!) in the US.

Ovuline's data comes from its hundreds of thousands of users, and the users' 4.4 million instances of sex. These users are trying to get pregnant, so record their sexual health activity and information daily.

Ovuline's data map shows that when trying to conceive, people have sex an average of 6.10 days per month (73.2 days per year).

According to Ovuline's data, people have the most sex in Idaho (seven days per month), they have the least sex in Washington, DC (4.62 days per month), and posits the Northwest region is the most sexually active area in the US.

The top five states (highest to lowest):

Idaho: 7 days

Vermont: 6.94 days

Nebraska: 6.92 days

Wyoming: 6.9 days

Iowa: 6.83 days

The bottom five states (lowest to highest):

Washington DC: 4.62 days

Mississippi: 5.27 days

New York: 5.53 days

Kentucky: 5.62 days

Delaware: 5.7 days

Ovuline CEO Paris Wallace told ZDNet:

"With our data, we’re answering longstanding questions around what’s normal when trying to get pregnant. How much sex is typical? Does where a person live affect how much sex they have?"

These questions paint a different picture of sex in the US than the usual headlines about "fap maps" — also from companies turning user data into interesting press.

Big Data Special Report

PornHub is most famous for spinning out these maps (not-safe-for-work), focusing their maps on user searches for adult material. They've figured out just about every way possible to spin the metrics, but in regard to Ovuline, data to make a "babby" and data to fap make for interesting comparisons.

Of PornHub's total 14.7 million users in 2013, Mississippi spent the most amount of time on the site while Rhode Island spent the least.

That's for you — and hopefully a lot of privacy advocates — to decide.

In light of recent headlines about a woman who had to go to shocking extremes to keep data resellers from find out she was pregnant, ZDNet asked Ovuline about its user data privacy practices.

Sarah Downey, Director of Marketing and Content at Ovuline said:

"Ovuline uses use industry best practices in keeping our servers and data secure. The apps are HIPPA-compliant, which isn't required for health apps, but we do it as an added protection for our users."

"When we show statistics about other Ovia users, they come from aggregate data stores and don’t identify people personally. The data in the sex map takes instances of sex and combines them into state groups; there's nothing else that would identify that a specific person had sex at a specific time. We sometimes publish insights like these to show the health research we're doing."

Ms. Violet Blue (tinynibbles.com, @violetblue) is a freelance investigative reporter on hacking and cybercrime at Zero Day/ZDNet, CNET and CBS News, as well as a noted sex columnist. She has made regular appearances on CNN and The Oprah Winfrey Show and is regularly interviewed, quoted, and featured in a variety of publications that inclu...
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Disclosure

Ms. Violet Blue is an Advisor for Without My Consent (a legal nonprofit for survivors of online harassment) and an Editor on the Editorial Board for The Porn Studies Journal (Routledge). She is a Member of the Internet Press Guild and a Member of The Center for Investigative Reporting. Ms. Blue is currently under contract for one book with NoStarch Press, and regularly freelances for various outlets including San Francisco online news outlet SF Appeal, Penthouse and Playboy. Ms. Blue's Nokia WindowsPhone is a review model from Microsoft. She is not sponsored by any company, person or entity, or under any exclusive contract.